Colin Hay goes the solo route at the Wilbur March 17

Thursday

Mar 16, 2017 at 12:48 PM

By Ed Symkus, Daily News Correspondent

It’s been more than three decades since the Australian band Men at Work hit its heights in America, with constant radio play, number one status “Who Can It Be Now” and “Down Under,” and the accompanying videos for those songs in regular rotation on MTV. By the late 1980s, band members had gone their separate ways, but singer-guitarist-main songwriter Colin Hay – a Scotsman by birth, but an Aussie since a family move to Melbourne in his teens – has never stopped making music on his own.

Though he often tours with The Colin Hay Band, his return to the Wilbur Theatre, on March 17, will be a solo gig to promote his new album “Fierce Mercy,” which covers a lot of ground taking in moods of pure pop, beautiful balladry, and full-out rock.

Hay had already been playing acoustic guitar in Scotland, where his dad ran a music shop, before the move across the world. Once settled there, he played in some bands, but was mostly accompanying himself on guitar in folk clubs and trying to write songs. By the time he met Ron Strykert, with whom he would form Men at Work, Hay was quite involved with the Australian music world.

“When I got there, in 1967, there were lots of bands,” said Hay by phone from his home in California’s Topanga Canyon. “There was lots of homegrown music as well as bands that were formed by a large number of immigrants that settled in Australia. That was a really strong time for people to emigrate from Britain to Australia. So you have bands like The Bee Gees and The Easybeats, which later became AC/DC when the Young brothers came over from Scotland. There was a pretty vibrant rock ’n’ roll scene in Australia then. After I met Ron in 1978, we wrote a few songs together, then played as an acoustic duo. That’s how we did ‘Down Under’ before Men at Work existed.”

Success came quickly for Men at Work in Australia and New Zealand, then spread around the world. Hay believes that MTV was instrumental in getting their name known, but insists they were a radio band first.

“MTV wouldn’t have played your videos unless you were already being played on the radio,” he said. “So MTV was really the thing that hit the homerun for us, in a way. But we had already gotten a lot of radio airplay before that.”

Then came a couple of hits and a few albums, along with the inner turmoil so many bands deal with: creative differences, ego clashes, and the like. Hay’s first solo album, “Looking for Jack,” was released in 1987. By 1989, he was ready for an even bigger change.

“Things were pointing away from Australia for me at that time,” he said. “I had a record deal with MCA records, which was based in Los Angeles, I was getting divorced from my first wife, and I was having problems with alcohol addiction. I knew what my life would be if I stayed in Australia, so I was taking steps to try and get on the right path. I had no real idea of what was to come or how it would be, but the thought of going to Los Angeles kind of excited me. So I took that opportunity, and as soon as I moved here I felt this was the right place to be.”

Many solo albums followed, most of them filled with his own compositions. But in recent years, he’s been collaborating with songwriter pal Michael Georgiades, who cowrote 10 of the tunes on “Fierce Mercy.”

“On this one, Michael would come to my house with all these ideas, and each idea was better than the last one,” he said. “I also had ideas. Michael would say, ‘Play me that or that,’ and we would work on the song. Over the period of a few months of bickering and indulging each other and inspiring each other to try to write better things, we had what we thought was an album’s worth of pretty strong material.”

Hay plans to play a lot that new material at the upcoming show, and he’s happy both to be back at the Wilbur and to be doing it solo.

“Boston has been a great city for me. I’ve played the Wilbur the past two or three times I’ve been here,” he said. “I just got back from being on the road with the band, which was fantastic. When you travel like a gang, it’s a different kind of touring experience. But the solo thing is great, too, for different reasons. It’s a little more solitary and pensive, and you get to stretch different muscles.”

So, will he be dipping into the Men at Work catalog this time out?

“I’ve never stopped playing the songs that were successful for Men at Work,” he said. “A few of them, anyway.”

Colin Hay plays at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston on March 17 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $34-$44. Info: 617-248-9700.

Upcoming concerts and club dates

March 17:

Driftwood, playing a lineup of bluegrass instruments, meshes together sounds of folk, country, punk, rock, and bluegrass at Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham. (8 p.m.)

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